My friend's usb flash drive has a project on it, right now it's displaying that it just wants to format as soon as it's plugged in. Is there anyway I could either recover the drive or the files at all, or is it a lost cause this point? I really don't have much background on the situation.

What file system did your friend use to format the USB flash drive?
Linux, MAC, Windows, etc.... if, he did the project on a different file format; the system may not think there is anything useful and wants to format it to make usable.
Or, the drive has gotten corrupted (like your friend pulled the drive before it was finished and the file table/partition info/etc. is corrupt).
Static could have gotten it, too.

It went down like this. He plugged it into his classmates laptop, took something off it, safely removed it, she plugs it back in later to get her presentation going then it asks to be reformatted. Him and his classmate both use Windows operating systems. I believe his classmate uses XP while he uses Win7. It has been plugged into Macs before as well. He says he always uses safe removal.

Edit: Flash drive finally appeared in the data recovery program, trying at it right now. Hoping for the best.

Posting to subscribe. My previous laptop has the same problem, I would plug in ANY external storage on it and it wants to format, even if I am 100% sure the flashdrives/ext hdd's work fine.

I also want to add that in my case even if I go ahead with the format, the drive still goes unrecognized. I ditched the laptop since a new one arrived and I didn't want to deal with it (its a company issued work unit) so I wanna know if someone figures out a fix

I did a recovery but it came out with .pkinfo and .lyr file extensions. I think I might buy the program from some website to get everyone completely off it, if I can figure this out. Really appreciate the help guys. It did pickup some Folders of interest and exact files, just weird file extensions.

Edit: found out those were actually filetypes he needed for his project. Hopefully it all works out, testing it out when he brings his laptop over.